Buying a Used Firewall

[SkydiverFL]

Which rack-mounted hardware firewall would you buy on a budget (preferably from eBay)? After spending quite a bit of cash on a new rack enclosure, servers, switch gear, and cabling for my home office, I've gone way over budget. I need a hardware based firewall and am looking to eBay. Unfortunately, I've been using SonicWall gear for so long that all others are foreign to me. And, unfortunately again, most SonicWall devices you see on eBay have been used in their "trade up" program and are no longer usable.

 

[john-b691]

It depends what the purpose of the firewall is. Simple stuff like protection of machine from attack is handled by most routers as a free feature. NAT alone will protect from the vast majority of the attacks with no firewall at all

If you are running servers exposed to the internet you start to get to the point of needing a real firewall because you may want some of the intrusion detection signatures. But these take very little processor power.

The place where it starts to matter is when you are run VPN tunnels on the firewall. This puts tremendous load on the device so you must look at the specifications.

Most devices from cisco,juniper,checkpoint were very expensive when new and still retain a lot of their value/cost even as they get old. Many times you can buy new sonicwalls or other lower tier firewall cheaper. A lot of the old cheap stuff you find on ebay is so old it does not even perform to the level of some new consumer routers.

 

[SkydiverFL]

Basic functionality... DMZ, a couple of VPN sessions (maybe), NAT-based routing. I wanted to go the firewall route, versus a simple router, because of the other inspection technologies that would probably exist within the unit.

 

[Guest]

Juniper NS25 or NS50?